


The Seventh Sin

by Sevargs



Series: Seven [2]
Category: Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super
Genre: Angst, Blood, Complicated Relationships, Crossing Timelines, Drama, Figuratively and literally there, GT Goku / DBS Vegeta, Hell hath no fury like a scorned Vegeta, Jealousy, M/M, Parallel Universes, Part 2, Self-Destruction, Sequel: Read Part One, Vegeta being Vegeta (Dragon Ball), Vegeta is actually just a big bitch and we all know it, Vegeta vs Himself, Violence, on a literal scale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-08-13 22:11:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16480697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sevargs/pseuds/Sevargs
Summary: /Sequel to The Law of Seven/A year after the Kakarot of the future timeline returned home, Vegeta is met with making the same mistakes again. To stay with this future Kakarot means incurring the wrath of the one person spiteful enough to find ways to make them feel the consequences. Himself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel, and in order to fully understand what's going on, you'll probably want to read The Law of Seven before starting this one.

All of the best firewood had been collected and left to dry over time in a pile by a small hut—untouched until recently. This humble dwelling lay a short distance from Kakarot’s own home, just barely out of sight of the other building. For many reasons, he had no business stepping foot anywhere near that place, but it was as simple as needing kindling that he did, coming around to collect bundles to bring back with him. 

Kakarot left him briefly—like he had done so each night before—to go hunt for something to put over the fire he was planning to build in his absence. Kakarot knew the area better, naturally, and Vegeta was still getting accustomed to the...difference of his world. He may never feel entirely comfortable there, but he would make it work for as long as he remained in it. Their plans hadn’t been put together much further beyond a split second impulse and the consequences left them with no real concrete place to be. This was only temporary, until they had a chance to actually figure out what to do. 

More foolish actions, and no way to undo them.

All these poor choices flowed through him like a disease and he had little hope of a cure. The gravity of it became that much more magnified when it sunk in what they’d actually done—and that they’d really actually done it. It wasn’t like him to be so unbelievably stupid. Kakarot was the patron saint of leaping into the fire and hoping for the best, and maybe he’d caught that from him and learned to take it to the same terrible extremes; physical contact with him had been a mistake after all. 

But, the days that passed by quietly, had been...peaceful. 

Vegeta did not belong there, but he wanted to remain. A year without this man had left him with a void so severe that he didn’t register it until he had reappeared. The guilt of leaving the other one was not washed away, but it had to be a sacrifice for the sake of contentment. He had tried, but it unraveled so easily that it was alarming. Warning bells chimed in his head and he knew he should have stepped back, but there he was. 

Gathering firewood in a quiet, serene place that wasn’t his. 

He stood straight, dusting dirt from his knees, and made his way from the pile of wood toward the hut. Within the building, he knew, Kakarot had more bindings to tie bundles together. He no longer felt uncomfortable stepping inside, despite knowing it was his grandfather’s old house. The knowledge of it had been so personal, and Vegeta had to take a moment to absorb it, initially. Sharing the details of his grandfather, had been much easier for someone like Kakarot, than it ever would be for Vegeta. Kakarot was a saiyan, but his human heart would never unattach him from the feelings associated with the humans in his life or his human experiences. 

Vegeta was remorsefully learning he might not be much better, given where he was standing. None of the sane saiyans he knew would have placed themselves in the position he placed himself. Emotional attachment to the point of personal endangerment. How human was that? 

He pulled a box from a small shelf within the hut and searched it for his target, but his attention was far removed from the contents within. The moving shadow on the wall was far more distracting and he could have had his hands on what he was looking for and have been unable to appreciate it for the unwillingness to look back down, once he had seen it; once he understood that the shadow came from someone blocking the doorway behind him. 

“Kakarot…?” He spoke, even though he knew it wasn’t him. If it was Kakarot, he wouldn’t suddenly feel like he was in danger. 

“Act like you don’t know better.” 

The echo back of his own voice left an icy feeling in his chest and he knew what to expect when he turned around. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before it came down to this, but maybe he hadn’t expected it this soon. Maybe he had hoped that the older image of himself would be embittered enough to never want to see them again and be content to see them vanish forever. 

But he did know better. He knew himself enough to know that he could not let things go. Obsession was, at least, one of his most outstanding qualities. Only second to his almost unparallelled ability to feel inward contempt for himself. At least this time, he could see a physical manifestation of that scorn, when he faced him. 

“I’d say you have a legendary pair, to actually set foot here,” his older counterpart spoke in a manner so casual, that it made him uncomfortable. The passive tilt of his head and his calm demeanor were false; and Vegeta knew it. His suppressed aura wasn’t made that way for his sake. He was hiding himself from Kakarot. 

He knew that his younger self was alone. 

“...This wasn’t to spite you.” 

“And yet, I’m feeling extraordinarily fucking spited,” he glanced down at his palm, curling his fingers into a tight fist. “You don’t have him to protect you now. So let’s see you talk to me like last time. Though, I don’t see that same spit you had,” he turned his eyes up and Vegeta found himself swallowing thickly at the sheer weight of his threat. “I think you understand that I meant what I fucking said, don’t you?” 

He did understand. Nothing about him—them—wasn’t complicated, and that included personal feelings toward himself. Having himself placed in front of him, with a readily available crime to account for, made executing a punishment all the more justifiable. Kakarot never did say how his progress with his own had gone, but it was suffice to say it must not have gone very far, if it had come to end in Vegeta face to face with the furious one left behind. 

“...Not in here. This is his grandfather’s house.” 

“And why the fuck should I care?” 

Being cornered by his own physical double felt like a surreal experience—just as it had the first time. Only the second time, he experienced a much larger margin of concern for his safety. He knew he was going to lose, the gap between them was far too large. Ten years, with both of them pushing at the same rate they always did, meant he could never catch up or overthrow him. The sheer depth of the fury he could sense off of him, topped off the disadvantage he had and Vegeta prepared to try to defend, hoping he would at least have the decency to let them leave the hut first. 

“You may not give a shit, but I do. If you’re supposed to care about Kakarot, enough to be coming after me while he’s away, then the least you can do, is not hurt him, by destroying priceless things.” 

“Your sudden humanity makes me fucking sick,” he sneered, grabbing him by the throat with the swift ease of someone bullying a child. “But if you insist, fine, let’s take this outside, shall we?” 

No other word could make it out of his mouth, before he found the half swung door of the hut breaking off its hinges; smacked against his shoulder when he was slammed through the small building by the force of a blow to the head that threw his whole body. He was willing to believe the strength of his fist colliding with his skull had knocked time backwards enough for him not to realize just when he’d let go of his neck to even accomplish that. His reflexes had no chance at all, but he had at least gotten away from the hut. Once he found his feet, he tried to widen the gap a little more. 

That wasn’t an issue, however, because the gap widened itself very quickly. His body double flew at him like a comet and even with the ability to block it, he was thrown far down into the forested area, away from where Kakarot left him. The ground came up at him and he did his best not to collide with it, but the foot stomping down into his back left him face-down in a messy heap. The fight barely started and it was already looking very bad for him. 

Being beaten to near death wasn’t new to him, but he wasn’t accustomed to his enemy knowing his strengths and weaknesses to the point of exploiting them with cruel efficiency. Stalling wouldn’t work, because the winner was clearly decided and this older form of him had no intention of letting him power up to give him a fighting chance. His days of letting his opponent have a chance had passed him. Especially not this opponent. 

Getting away seemed like his best option and it took every bit of push in his body just to get out of his range. But even that wasn’t enough and when he was caught, he was punished so severely for it, that he wondered if he should have just stayed still and taken the beating up front. Every strike felt like it was coming from a place of hatred that he’d never known existed in himself and if he didn’t feel like he was being exorcised from the world itself for his transgressions, then he’d be impressed by it. 

But with every set of knuckles that cracked his ribs and threatened to break the bones in his face, he considered that he never wanted to feel the depth of the rage this man must be experiencing. He tried to stand and move away, only to be grabbed by him and viciously choked, fingers so tightly around his neck that breathing was a gift when he could manage it. The trembling of that man’s arms wasn’t from the strain of trying to keep him there, but rather from the barely contained fury. 

He loosened his choke hold only enough to free a hand, just so he could hit him. A blow to the head. 

And again. 

And again. 

Then switching hands to hit him from the other side. 

A hard fist to the sternum. He could taste blood in his mouth, and acid rising from his stomach. 

Another swift punch into his side drove the air from his lungs until he had to pant to regain his composure. 

And once he had it back, he took a knee to the gut and then collected stars with yet another set of knuckles directly into the side of his head. 

Nonstop. What was probably only seconds felt like forever and he had no ability to get his foot in between it all. He had to endure it. He’d taken his share of beatings before, he certainly could take another one...but this one had a sharpness to it, that was like torture. 

He held his breath and waited for it to end. 

“Vegeta—Vegeta—stop—” 

And it did, eventually, and for the first time, he was relieved to see Kakarot show up to be the hero. He needed saving and for once, he wasn’t going to object. He didn’t have a part of his body he was in control of, by the time Kakarot arrived and his double had him by the collar, dangling him helplessly—prepared to continue. Bloodied fists would have kept going until he wasn’t conscious or worse, he was sure. 

“What the fuck do you want, Kakarot, I’m busy having an...internal dialogue,” he almost sounded amused, within his anger. 

“...If...if you’re angry, then it’s my fault, there’s no need for this... just…” 

“If you come a single step closer to me, I will kill him and leave him in so many fucking pieces, that Shenron will tell you to go fuck yourself.” 

That was enough to pause Kakarot, and Vegeta felt a little despair rise in him. Death wasn’t something he feared anymore, but he certainly didn’t want to die by his own hand—not in front of Kakarot, especially. Stronger things had killed him before and Kakarot had been there to see him die, but this was a completely different thing. Kakarot might actually blame himself for this one if it went too far and there was no one truly to blame for this but Vegeta himself and his mental instability. 

“...Don’t do this...c’mon…” 

“Did you think about this when you decided to bring this back here?” He lifted Vegeta up for emphasis, and Vegeta’s body screamed at the movement—pain threaded through every bit of him. “Did you consider the very concept that you were bringing my replacement here, and expecting me not to retaliate? Kakarot, it’s like you met me yesterday.” 

“I…” 

“Don’t say you’re sorry. You’re not. You’re, surprisingly, a bigger asshole than I gave you credit for. Props to you, Kakarot. It’s the most saiyan thing you’ve ever fucking done to me.” His sneer was not pleasant. His fingers dug into Vegeta’s face and he lifted him directly to look him in the eyes. “You’d pick this soft little piece of shit, then I suppose you can just have him. At least you won’t have to worry about him keeping up with you. He’s not much of a fight.” 

“...This isn’t because…” Kakarot started, but no words he could say managed to make it far before a growl shut him down. The older Vegeta was not having any of it. His patience was gone and his anger was maxed out. 

“You should have never involved me. I didn’t deserve a single fucking moment of you.” His grip tightened on Vegeta’s face again and the strength of it was crushing—pressure on his jaw tight enough that he could almost feel his bones giving in. 

“...Please just let him go…” 

“You can have him,” he answered, suddenly shoving him away. The relief of pressure was short lived, replaced with the extreme flood of pain that spread across his chest after his foot collided with his body—catapulting him right into Kakarot, who moved to catch him as easily as he could. He was safe, but he felt like dying. “Now that I know how you’ve gotten through, I’m going to tell the other Kakarot where you are. He deserves to know what you’ve done. Try and stop me and I’ll destroy you both. And don’t think I can’t, Kakarot.” 

“This doesn’t have do go this way... “ 

“You made it go this way,” he stood straighter, wiping the blood from his knuckles off on the back of his jeans and pulling something from a back pocket. He threw it at Kakarot, but Vegeta couldn’t focus enough to see what it was. His vision was blurring and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to maintain consciousness for long. He was quickly losing the fight. 

Kakarot knew that. He cradled him and Vegeta could see him trying to communicate with him, but he couldn’t hear him anymore. He tried nodding, but he wasn’t sure what he was nodding about. Kakarot eventually stopped trying and he accepted the silence. 

And the quiet took over for a while, and he shut down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to my lovely wife, who lets me bounce all of my wild ride ideas off her. And to dreamyghost and cosmicmewtwo for reading the horrible typo ridden versions. And Spotify for all of the angry songs because I needed them.


	2. Chapter 2

“How did you get back here?” The breathy question killed the silence, but the answer didn’t come immediately. He wanted to know, but his focus was split between the words and his own fingers peeling the wet clothes off the body against him. A puddle formed between their feet and fabric piled on top of it. Despite being drenched right through, Kakarot’s skin was warm; he was real. Hands trailed over his bare body, from his chest to his shoulders, coming around his neck and then to his face—a touch of desperation crept between the two of them that went unchecked entirely. 

Vegeta had always thought he’d never let himself be so weakened by a single person, but in a single instant, he felt his defeat come as swiftly as his hands possessively gripping his ribs to claim him. The mouth against his neck meant to leave marks that he shouldn’t. The hum of a person he had, but also didn’t. The familiarity of this Kakarot brought back every desire he suppressed deep down, when he had the other one. 

All of it should have gone away, but it hadn’t. 

Kakarot’s whole body seemed to envelope him, with his arms snaking his torso and embracing his shoulders. He’d been held by the same man before, but this time felt like being resuscitated. The guilt he felt didn’t have enough presence to put a stop to what he was doing. His Kakarot had full faith in him to be honest. But to see him again...to feel him, a phantom that he should never have a glimpse of again, that could slip away again just as easily...turned off every sensible process of thought. 

His fingers pressed into Kakarot’s scalp, dragging down through his wet hair to bring his face back up to his. Every damned kiss brought him back to the last one and his heartbeat a little harder—waiting for it to vanish, like a cruel dream. He’d wake up beside his own Kakarot and have to look him in the face and explain that it was nothing; knowing how deeply he still wanted the Kakarot he couldn’t have. Continuing would force him to play off his own tremendous guilt to a man who had the forgiveness of a saint. And yet, he had no intention of stopping. 

Kakarot.

A gold chain tangled between his fingers when he wrapped them around his neck, holding him there so he couldn’t move his face away. The glinting gold caught his eye and he pulled, twisting the metal with his thumbs. It tore his attention from Kakarot’s face to the piece of jewelry that he knew Kakarot would never wear on his own. He’d never known the man to choose decorative accessories and he’d never have purchased it himself. Never in all the time he’d known him, it meant his wife wasn’t in the mind of doing it either. 

Vegeta was the type to have jewelry, however. He could have been the one to give it to him. But he hasn’t the one. Not him. The thick chain rolled between his finger and thumb, and he wanted to pull the chain from his neck. To snap it right off for its crime of making him think deeper about it. The reminder of the older, angry version of himself. 

But a hand tipped his face and turned him away from the distraction, mouth collecting his attention away from the offending accessory. That was all it really took to smooth him down enough to loosen his choking grip on the chain. 

“Sorry, I stole it. Didn’t think you’d miss it…You had several.” Kakarot mumbled and Vegeta froze, gripping the necklace tighter again. It was his? 

“You sentimental buffoon,” he replied, toying with the idea of biting him for the crime of taking his damn belonging and for leaving him with several moments of believing this item might have come from another. Being irritated for thinking it might have been another person’s item, was nothing short of stupid. This man wasn’t his and he had no business feeling anything; and yet, he was relieved. “You certainly like to take things from me, Kakarot.” 

“Yeah...Sorry, but...Because I took it, I could come back through, I think…” He pressed his forehead against Vegeta’s. “I had...something from your world still...that’s the only reason I could think of...I didn’t try going back through yet...I didn’t really care to, I just…”

“You just made all the bad choices immediately, is what you did,” he shook his head, taking his face into his hands. 

“I did. I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to, but...Then, I…” He was quiet, for longer than Vegeta needed him to be, to get the idea that the words he would say would embarrass him. 

“You are impulsive. That’s all it is, Kakarot. You never change.” He didn’t let him continue. To let him continue, risked letting him say more than either of them needed him to say. Kakarot was drawn back to him by feelings he didn’t have the willpower to shut down and Vegeta… understood them. Hated them. Severely. But he understood them. “What if I hadn’t been alone?” 

“Then I would have left you be…” The cringe was very apparent, but Vegeta didn’t retract the intention of his question. Kakarot had to know there could be a chance that he would be with his own. He had to know that he risked hurting himself more by coming back here, a year later, after they had both parted ways—with the intention of it being forever. Both of them had every opportunity to pursue the one they wanted; to fix the damage their temporary wild affair had caused. 

It was only by the usual dumb luck of Kakarot’s, that Vegeta was just as foolish. 

“He won’t be here tonight,” he said, knowing how directly the words implied the invitation. They were just that, an invitation. Without saying it directly, he was telling him he did not have to go. The chance to turn it back and make him leave, slipped between his fingers. 

As if he hadn’t already lost his chance the moment he’d taken him into the room and put his hands on him. There had never been a chance at all. The very idea was a weak illusion at best; a vague thought that passed with no traction. If only Vegeta was as strong of a man as he like to bluster. 

“You can turn me away, if that’s what you want,” Kakarot spoke, as if he actually understood the need to respond to the complicated undertone of his words for once. Yet, those words didn’t sound any bit convincing. The door was already closed and he was on the side he was going to be on for the night. 

“Shut up,” Vegeta shook his head and gripped his chin in a hand; not lightly either. “You come all this way and then say those words to me? Where’s your spine, Kakarot?” 

“Y’know, the angrier you back home keeps asking me the same question.” 

Vegeta snarled, nearly leaving bruises on his cheeks for the strength of his vice-like grip. How dare he even speak such a thing to his face. “Then why don’t you learn to man the fuck up and find it, if you know we’re both getting tired of your shit. You’ve been here five minutes and you’ve already started getting on my fucking nerves,” he spat, mostly bristled by the comparison being made so flippantly. Leave it to Kakarot to sour a mood. 

“I’m sorry, I just...know I…”

“Kakarot, what do you want? You’ve come back here. You’ve interrupted my life again. I’ve been trying to get over it. And here you are, a fresh sucker punch. Like, you are a consistent thorn in my side from the moment you existed, into the future I’m not even a part of. If you’re not going to come out and fucking tell me what you want, then maybe you should actually go.” He steeled himself, trying to put on an unyielding face. Kakarot dared to place himself in front of him, but didn’t have the guts to go all in this time. 

He watched dark eyes flicker for a moment, and could see a process of thought going on that was unusual for Kakarot. He was actually thinking about what he was going to say. Vegeta was patient, waiting for him to collect his thoughts together, because whatever he decided to finally say, would determine everything. Somehow, he knew Kakarot didn’t have the answer that was the objectively smarter one; because not a muscle moved to suggest he was going to leave.

“I want...you. That’s...really all I want.” 

Simple. He was simple. Kakarot wasn’t a complicated creature at all and Vegeta knew it. This man hadn’t really considered any of the consequences; or if he had, they hadn’t been significant enough to stop him from standing before him and saying the words to him. But Vegeta didn’t have a leg to stand on, when faced with the sock to the chest his declaration had been. The words struck him in a way that he didn’t feel from the Kakarot he had now. 

The truth of it was terrible, but undeniable. 

A year of trying—and honestly, really caring about his own Kakarot—hadn’t managed to erase the the seeds they’d planted. 

His fingers curled, dragging down from his face to his chest. Eye contact broke and he leaned into him for a moment, before he could collect himself. A palm pressed flat against his bare skin and he pushed him—shoved him, really. Without any gentleness at all, he threw Kakarot back; watching with some satisfaction, at the expression of alarm that crossed his face when the back of his knees collided with the edge of the bed. Kakarot toppled back over on it and he scrambled to recover from the moment of being caught off guard. 

Vegeta had him, however, locked in place—crawling over him to straddle his hips. Kakarot didn’t offer resistance for very long; his large hands found his thighs and when Vegeta leaned down to meet his mouth, words stopped flowing between them. The only words he needed to hear out of Kakarot, were spoken and he only had the capacity for physical response. 

No more thinking, no more talking. 

He briefly considered what he was doing; in the same moment he nearly took the breath from his lungs. The thought of his Kakarot passed through his mind, but got lost behind the face in his view. The same face, but not the same at all. 

Perhaps Kakarot could feel the turmoil within him about it; perhaps he just felt the desire to hold him with a body more powerful than anyone else could. Whatever the reason, Vegeta accepted the visual difference. To look down and see the Kakarot below him take the super saiyan four form for him, made the connection so much more concrete. It solidified the difference and let him sever the guilt. 

The tail that curled around him, clinging to his hips and waist, never belonged to the Kakarot of his world. It was the fantasy that pulled him down and took him away again. The fantasy that dragged him into hell and was going to keep him there. 

And he was going to burn down willingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Belated updates are entirely due to NaNoWriMo and blitz writing on Kakavege week. Once that's all squared away, I will finish editing the finished chapters on this one. I swear. Until then, enjoy the trainwreck I do have for you!


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re not thinkin’ bout me,” Kakarot said flatly, and it crashed through Vegeta’s train of thought like a full set of knuckles to the jaw. The tone of his voice held an edge to it that left a sinking sensation in the pit of Vegeta’s stomach—remarkably like how a guilty person might feel being directly accused. In a sense, the accusation was there, though Kakarot didn’t make it with a literal sense in mind. He made it, thinking with a wandering mind—and he was not incorrect. But he was not wrong, for even worse reasons than Kakarot knew. 

“What do you want me to say, Kakarot?” He grumbled, trying to withdraw. He was unable to look at him when he was so acutely aware of his presence and the crime he committed against him—that he knew he didn’t deserve. Vegeta never had claimed to be the most honorable person in the universe, but he knew a cheap shot when he saw one. Nothing he could immediately think of was more distasteful than what he’d done—and he had done his fair share of horrendous things in his life.

“I guess nothin’, but I know you’re not really...lookin’ at me. It’s...just been a while since I noticed. Thought maybe I finally won, but I guess I got a little more to go,” he explained, toying with a wristband before he inhaled and finally stretched his arms out to brace his hands on his knees. Kakarot glanced back at him, but Vegeta continued to avoid direct eye contact.To look at him meant to face him and he felt transparent. Kakarot wasn’t exactly a mind reader, or brilliant at all, but he thought he could give himself away with his own guilty face. 

“Don’t be ridiculous, Kakarot,” he muttered, with nothing else at add. Nothing else to flavor it up and reassure him that there was nothing else to be concerned about. He did nothing else to attempt to alleviate the discomfort of the one who was trying. A whole lot of nothing. 

He could even acknowledge that Kakarot was making efforts—annoying as his hovering was at times. Kakarot just...took too long to step to the plate, and the shoes he had to fill were ten years more mature—for as mature as any Kakarot could come to be. He had every right to be disheartened by Vegeta’s weakness. After all, the only reason it ever happened to begin with was because of unspoken, unrequited feelings. Logically, that problem would no longer exist once the fog was blown away and they were left uncovered. Right? Then why did they still exist in the same damnable haze as before? 

Because Vegeta mistakenly let himself get caught up, when he swore he wouldn’t. Kakarot was supposed to go home and take everything that happened between them, with him. Instead, he took a piece of Vegeta and kept it, instead. Kakarot was always taking things from him and never asking; Vegeta never bothered to retrieve those things from him either. Just like the gold chain that he let the other Kakarot leave with again—knowing it meant he was connected to him. 

The worst part of it all, was that he did care about his own Kakarot. As much as it pissed him off to even admit to such a damn thing. The man who caused him so much grief in his life. The man whose face he wanted to sucker punch at every given moment, honestly offered him more in his life than anything else. Aside from his family, Kakarot was the only other worthwhile thing the universe had to offer. Not that he’d seen it all, but he didn’t want to see it all. He didn’t need to. He’d seen more than most and the most of what he’d witnessed was horrific and ugly. Kakarot was an annoying positive spot on a dark and nasty existence—and maybe that was why he hated him so damn much. 

Maybe that was why he was worth so much. He was the only other person aside from Bulma that saw him and didn’t immediate see a demon. 

Could it really just be that the older Kakarot got to him first? That seemed so simplistic and unreasonable. Years of the...unusual bond of friendship built between he and his Kakarot couldn’t possibly taken over by essentially a stranger from another timeline in a matter of weeks—months. 

But that was what happened. 

The odd back and forth between them about the pitiful situation they were in, offered them a commonplace of understanding. Their banter was morose flirting that brought them closer together, until they weren’t licking each other wounds anymore. He wasn’t using the other Kakarot in place of his Kakarot. He had simply become the Kakarot he wanted. That was a problem. 

Because he still looked at the one native to his world—native to him—and wanted to feel the things he felt before. The obsession he had for Kakarot never went away at all, it was just no longer the Kakarot he needed it to be directed toward. 

And his Kakarot could feel it. 

Vegeta agonized that he let it get to that point, even as he tried to push away the thoughts of the night before—of the other Kakarot, and of the relief he felt with him. He had the attention of the one he wanted all along and now he was fucking it all up by willfully opening his arms for the other. Saiyans weren’t monogamous by any stretch of the imagination, but there was a limit to just how insensitive one could be, when taking up a bed with the very same person from another time and place. 

Almost worse than directly telling him he wasn’t good enough. 

But it wasn’t like Vegeta didn’t try to get his attention before. He had. He had done everything he could think of to make Kakarot see him. It finally took being caught fucking his alternative universe equivalent for Kakarot to see that he desired him in any way. Kakarot was thick, he knew that; but he didn’t quite realize just how thick, until everything went up in smoke in his face. Not until he was staring into his own aged face and receiving the beating of his life. 

He knew himself, and the danger he faced, but he continued anyway. And he wasn’t surprised, to wake up in pain—mind fresh from the memory of his conversation with his Kakarot, and also the physical trauma of the punishment he earned.

In the silence, he blinked slowly, thinking about Kakarot. About that conversation. He never really answered him. He never offered him anything at all. In retrospect, that was cruel and he couldn’t actually be angry with his future self for the sheer scale of the slaughter he laid down on him. He deserved for Kakarot to be the one to do that to him, but he knew he wouldn’t ever be the one who would. Kakarot, who had told him that he knew Vegeta wasn’t thinking about him, had still held him that night—even knowing that he wasn’t the one. 

The very fact that he was that willing to still remain that fixed, haunted Vegeta’s dreams. It may have just been what woke him out of his black out. His absolute need not to feel Kakarot’s affection for him, despite his honest to god betrayal. Because that’s exactly what it was. 

He could look at the older Kakarot, because at least this one was as awful of a person as he was. This one just had to contend with betraying a much angrier person. Of course, he took the brunt of his betrayal. That was such a Vegeta reaction; he was absolutely not surprised at all. If he was in his position, he would be beating his own ass too. Mentally, he was doing just that. 

Even so, the very first thing he did upon waking, was to reach out for Kakarot and try and let him know he was awake. Though, he didn’t appear to need to do so, as Kakarot was already moving closer to him by the time he managed to get a handful of his shirt. 

“Hey, you’re awake,” Kakarot observed, leaning closer; and Vegeta felt like clocking him in the temple with his knuckles, briefly. 

“Brilliant deduction,” he inhaled and felt like he needed to go back to sleep from that alone. The pain seemed to be largely gone, actually, but he felt winded and his whole body was just exhausted. “I feel like I was murdered.” 

“That mighta been more merciful,” Kakarot offered him water, but he didn’t want to sit up immediately to drink it—even if his body was begging for it. He was starving and thirsty. “I had no idea he was gonna come at you like that, or I’d have never left you alone.” 

“Kakarot, don’t apologize at me. We talked about this lack of spine thing already. There was nothing you were going to do to stop him,” he dismissed him immediately. “I honestly deserved that anyway.” 

“You didn’t deserve that. Stop it. If he was going to take it out on anyone, it should have been me. I got us into this mess. It was my idea to do this...” 

“And I went right along with it, didn’t I?” Vegeta countered him, before he could attempt to soak up the guilt for it. Kakarot was not the type to acknowledge consequences and he didn’t like that he was starting now, even if they really should start to consider the results of their actions. The idea to leave with Kakarot was possibly the most foolish decision he’d ever made in all of his life, but it was what he wanted in the moment. 

Being trapped with his feelings and the younger Kakarot’s forever-forgiving nature was too much for him. The sinner that was the older Kakarot, was closer to what he understood. This man was as awful like he was, at least in the moment he was. They had what they spent portions of their lives reaching for, and then they threw it away for something that wasn’t even part of their own world. 

He wanted badly to reverse it all and go back to his obsession with the Kakarot who innocently held him in high regard without him even knowing. But he ruined it. 

I ruin everything. And I haven’t even attempted to fix it. 

And he still wasn’t attempting to. 

“I’m here now, Kakarot, I don’t know how long this is going to last, but for what it is, fucking take it.” He finally did struggle to sit up, looking down at himself and trying to figure out why he was mostly just stiff and not a broken and bloodied mess. He wasn’t unconscious for that long.

“...I should never have come back to you… Damn it, Vegeta… It’s so hard. I’m not good at all this stuff. I thought that… You were just a reminder of him back then when he still had spirit in him and it was fun, but then I got...really attached. And I don’t wanna let go. It’s bad. I know. It’s super bad. He looks at me and sometimes he’s there, but he’s...not... He ain’t you and I…” Kakarot covered his face with his palms. 

“We were supposed to leave it behind us and we didn’t. Because what we wanted, we didn’t think we were going to get, Kakarot. Then we got it,” he braced himself against a knee and reached for water, desperate for something to cool him down. “It’s not just you. I should never have let you step back in. I’m supposed to be the smart one and yet here I am. I walked myself right into my own fists. And I’m pretty sure I’m stupid enough to have done it again, if told in advance it would happen. Just like you. The idiot who leaps before looking. Right, Kakarot? You who came back to me, not knowing what you’d find.” 

Kakarot was silent, but his expression confirmed everything Vegeta said. 

“I’m here, because I tried to hate you and failed spectacularly. Just another fucking thing I failed at doing in regards to you, Kakarot.”

“...Vegeta…” 

“And you came to me because you didn’t want one that hated you, did you? You big fucking asshole. You want me to tell you tell you that I love you, don’t you?” Vegeta cast him such a heavy, scathing look; but only because he felt so deeply within himself the truth of it, that he didn’t know how to even handle it. 

Kakarot didn’t answer him. He didn’t expect that much from him and it was clear from his silence and from the slightly widened eyed expression. 

“Well, over my dead body, Kakarot,” he hissed at him, and gulped from the glass like he was going to die if he didn’t drink the whole thing. He didn’t have to say anything at all and he knew it. By now, Kakarot had come to understand that Vegeta’s intricacies had to be inferred. Very few people were talented enough to be able to translate his intentions. 

Kakarot understood him and his withdrawn nature in a way that he couldn’t with the older Vegeta. He wasn’t so repressed and gone that he was unreachable. He didn’t actually feel hated, even when Vegeta snarled at him and told him he hated him. It wasn’t hate at all. It hadn’t been hate in so many years that Vegeta wanted to punch himself in the throat for the concept of it. 

He was a poor fucking excuse of a saiyan to let a concept of love completely unroot him. But there he was. 

“Well, keep this up and I’m sure he’ll work that request out for you, ‘Geta.” Kakarot snorted softly, having the nerve to look him directly and the face and actually utter those words. 

The temptation to bruise his skull with his knuckles was overwhelming. “Kakarot, shut the fuck up. You better fucking come quicker next time.” He soured, knowing it wasn’t actually his fault. His older self hid his presence and the only reason Kakarot knew to even come running was he himself had flared his ki out. 

“I won’t leave for a while...He said, he was going to go tell your...me, where we were and I feel like maybe if I leave it’s only asking for a repeat of that…Though, I don’t really know what to think...He left senzu beans behind...After you fell unconscious.” 

Vegeta stared at him confused, brows turning together. He didn’t understand the reasoning behind such a move, but it made sense why he felt so terrible, yet didn’t have any actual injuries to show for it. If Kakarot had him chew it unconscious, it would have left him feeling less than perfect, but considerably better. But what was his asshole older self’s end game in beating him near to death, and then throwing the recovery at him? 

“I don’t get it…” 

“Me neither. But he left, and I’ve heard nothing since then. It’s been quiet. I cooked some food, waiting for you, and thought the other one would show up, but he never did...So I don’t know… I guess for now, maybe try to eat a little and we can worry about stuff later?” 

“Worrying about anything at this point is akin to trying to take a fire extinguisher to a wildfire, Kakarot.” 

“Alright, well, when were done with dinner, you grab one and I’ll grab one and we’ll save as many trees as we can with those two extinguishers, a’right?” 

Vegeta snorted, shaking his head. “You are a gigantic dumbass, now feed me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends, long time no see, I’m here to update and remind you all that I’m not dead, I’ve actually got lots of work here prepared, but due to prep do kakavege week I’ve been dormant. This is going up as I’ve come to my last bit of work for the week and it’s safe to say this will get back to seeing progress along with When in Rome! 
> 
> I have 80k words of stories coming for kakavege week starting the 27th. So I was not silent for nothing. Anyway, enjoy this guilty pleasure of mine in the meantime and thank you very much for your commentary. And I hope you enjoy going down with me!! (I will do my best to respond to folks!)


	4. Chapter 4

Days of silence should have been peaceful. The absence of threat should have been a relief; that maybe perhaps they weren’t going to be be faced with a fight on their hands as bad as Vegeta was anticipating. Recovering from the beating of his life had left him slightly paranoid. Paranoid to be left alone. That was a feeling that soured him; left a bad taste in his mouth. The concept of being vulnerable made him grind his teeth any time he thought about it. At least the danger was almost an acceptable one, when he considered the concern was coming from...a version of himself. 

No one kicked his ass harder than he did, unfortunately; even outside of the literal, physical altercation. The several quiet days only served to stack a background sense of anxiety—until he was waiting for it to break at every sound. Unconsciously, he was listening for it and feeling for ki signatures he knew he wouldn't be able to pickup. If his future self was going to come back for round two, he would certainly hide his presence. Not to mention, he wouldn’t likely approach him with Kakarot so close. 

He suspected that his older self didn’t want to confront Kakarot directly. His anger was probably just centrally focused, or maybe he didn’t have the energy to battle it out physically with someone who wouldn’t feel the same level of crushing defeat by it. Kakarot was able to defend on the same level. He hadn’t been. Even if he’d had more of a chance to try and get his bearings, he would have been backed against a wall. 

If he hadn’t been losing so horrendously, he would have been in awe of his potential. But the depth of his anger was also alarming. 

And he was jumping at everything in preparation for it to come back. Everything about his tragic loss against himself—and that man’s exit—implied that he would be back. It was just a matter of when. But “when”, didn’t come for days. “When” still hadn’t come. He still was glancing out and keeping his watch on Kakarot’s location any time he was even slightly out of his direct line of sight, just in case. 

Kakarot never did go very far—however—sensing his tension. Vegeta wanted to act offended at waking up from sleep and having a large pair of arms around him, but he found it difficult to even attempt to worm himself out of them. This was why he was there in the first damn place, because he couldn’t escape—maybe just didn’t want to try escaping. Surely, if he wanted to escape he could have. He lost against himself, but he was certain he could win a fight against Kakarot. A battle against this man wasn’t all about throwing punches and bulging muscles. If he used even some brain power against him, he could easily undo him. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t use brain power for himself and it was his own unraveling. 

He sat up and rubbed his face, still tangled in limbs that weren’t his. Kakarot leaned a bit, hunching his shoulders to turn his face into Vegeta’s side and he resisted the innate urge to punt his elbow into the side of his head. This grown man—here older than him—cuddling him like a giant buffoon. He couldn’t even use the excuse of being asleep, because Vegeta could see an eye peeking open at him. 

“You honestly,” he started, words a bit thick from sleep, “are going to just, plant yourself there. Like this.” 

“It’s still early, sleep a lil more,” Kakarot protested, eyes going right back to closed. This idiot could clearly sleep comfortably and he almost wanted to get up and jump on him for his ease of brushing off anxiety. Every morning he woke up before the sun rose, if he was even able to sleep through the darkness at all. But then, Kakarot didn’t understand him at a deep enough level to understand the kind of person he knew he could be. Kakarot wouldn’t understand why he had a reason to be concerned about every fucking noise he heard. Vegeta was not like Kakarot. Vegeta was the type of person to go out of his way to make certain he accomplished his goal at the cost of himself. 

And if he was angry enough, that could be an unpredictable wild card. 

I can’t even predict myself, Kakarot, how can you expect me to sleep through that. What is it like to be that simple?

He butted his knuckles against his forehead and pushed his face back enough to look at him. “You snore when you sleep, how am I supposed to honestly get any rest?” 

Kakarot had the nerve to open an eye and square off directly with him, “that sounds suspiciously like an excuse.” 

He leaned forward, face just about within biting range and he snarled just slightly, “go fuck yourself.” 

“Pretty sure he would not be up for that.” 

He had no sympathy for the hiss that came from Kakarot when he pinched him in response. Of all the tasteless comments... he should have thanked some gods for not being thrown out into space in retaliation. Vegeta didn’t find the same humor in it...maybe someday he might, but at the moment, the two of them were the biggest fucking sources of his anguish and if he could have just shot them both off into space and wished their memories away forever, then he would deeply consider the option. Simplify his life and just go back to life without idiots in it. But unfortunately, life without this idiot had been a big fucking slump of depression that made him into another fucking hurricane of disaster. 

The entire scenario surrounding majin Buu’s resurrection briefly flickered through his mind and he realized that all of his bad decisions in life were just bursts of impulse surrounding obsession with this big idiot. How many years had he dumped into this fool without really...admitting that? 

Oh no, we’re not having this crisis while he’s laying in your lap. This isn’t even your real crisis, this is your fantasy crisis. Stop it. 

“Geta, c’mon, I was kiddin’.” Kakarot did finally sit up and he was again reminded that he was capable of folding himself around him without much effort—scooping him back against his chest and embracing him like Vegeta asked for that. He didn’t. He didn’t want any of this affectionate bullshit. But he also didn’t stop any of it. “I know you’re worried, ‘cause that’s kinda your thing, but I’m not going to vanish. I shouldn’t have left you here out of my range to begin with, knowing you’re in a world that’s not really yours…” 

“That’s….Not it.” He exhaled. Explaining it to Kakarot would be far too difficult, so he didn’t try. “You just, don’t know me. Not...the part of me that’s angry enough…”

“We’ll deal with him, okay? He’s angry, but he’s never been completely unreasonable.” Vegeta bit his lip and lifted a finger to raise a very valid point, but Kakarot cut him off before a word could come out of his mouth and he clicked his tongue and started again, “Okay, there were a few times, but I don’t feel like he’s going to go jumping directly into the fire.”

“Not while you’re here.”

“I’m not going to leave you, you know.” 

“Kakarot, you won’t be able to guard me forever. I’m not afraid of getting my own ass handed to me by myself, because I’m very fucking good at doing that, but I don’t know what the end game is. If he was just going to beat me down, then I feel like I wouldn’t be so fucking nervous right now.” 

“That’s the paranoia in you talking.” 

“I’m surprised you know what that even fucking means, honestly. But that’s not it. I mean,” he rubbed his face and wanted to hit something—anything to alleviate the anxious, twitchiness in his chest. “It’s probably part of it. Some of us experience some goddamn self preservation. But I know he’s done something and it’s making me goddamn nervous.” 

“Your confidence in yourself is amazing in the...worst kinda way, gotta say.” 

“You just have too much complacency, that’s a—” 

He sat straighter, words stopped by the sudden sensation that made his chest tighter. This time, it wasn’t just a phantom feeling, because Kakarot responded the same way. Briefly, he caught eyes with him and made to stand. At least they felt it. There was nothing sneaking about this. The source of this energy was coming directly at them like a beacon. Standing out in front of the building, washing the whole area with the heat of its aura. No one who could sense ki would be able to ignore it. 

The dread Vegeta had been building was not unfounded, and he knew it. He knew it would come back around to this. Feeling the sudden disturbance reminded him that their peace was only temporary. The very fact that they had been left alone for that many days had been incredible enough. The expectations had been for it to come crashing down much sooner than it had. Even then, when he stared at the door, knowing what was on the other side, it was still not really what he was expecting. 

When he pushed the thin wooden barrier open and stepped out, he faced the visitor standing not even ten paces away. 

For a long moment, silence. 

Unnerving silence. 

What was he supposed to say? 

It didn’t matter. 

“It’s time to come home, Vegeta,” the sheer intensity of his tone, left him unable to say anything at all. Even if he knew what to say. Kakarot stood in front of him, acting unaware of the one behind Vegeta. But he was aware of him. He was very aware, because everything in his ki radiated his willingness to commit to a fight and Vegeta was alarmed. The two of them would fight if they let their hotheadedness get in the way and there would be absolutely nothing he could do if they did. 

“Kakarot, you—” he started, but the sudden flicker of energy snapped at him and his confusion silenced him. Did he just…?

“We’re goin’ home. You don’t belong here. I’ve ignored it for a while, but it’s kinda a lil much, don’tcha think, for you to just fuckin’ run away,” he snapped at him and Vegeta watched the Kakarot from his timeline change forms, skipping right into Blue, without any hesitation in front of him. His attention diverted from him, directly to the man behind him and Vegeta understood why, when he leaned back to feel the larger tone of the older Kakarot’s body. His alarm at just hearing the unsettling sour note of Kakarot’s angry words had distracted him from even noticing the Super Saiyan Four shift and he felt the control of the situation slipping before it was ever even there. 

“H….Hey—Stop it, you two…” He took a step forward and looked back at one Kakarot and then back to the other. His attention turned to his own and hissed, “why are you trying to start a fight—this isn’t going to help—, literally, this is all you do—”

“I thought you respected power? Well, when I beat him, then I’ll take you back and we’ll talk it over then.” 

“You think you’re going to beat me?” 

The growl that came from behind him, left Vegeta unnerved and he reached out to stop him, but he miscalculated one small detail that he cursed every day of his damn life since Kakarot came back separately from them on his return from Namek. Instant Transmission. He reach into air and before he could even turn all the way back around, the two of them were within reach of each other. It was like watching a horror movie in slow motion in its own way. It was going to be a slaughter if it went anything like how it went for him and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want his Kakarot to be obliterated like that, because he did fucking care about him and he didn’t do a damn thing to earn it; but they were both too stupid to reach. 

“If I win, you’re done. With him. Leave him alone.” 

“And if I win, then what? I still have to deal with my Vegeta. He walked you right to us, obviously. That’s actually really incredible,” he sneered, the sheer scale of his form made him appear more threatening than the younger Kakarot somehow. “Bitch didn’t even want to fight his own battle.” 

The fist that connected with the older Kakarot’s face surprised Vegeta as much as it did Kakarot himself, like he struck in defense of the older Vegeta. The elder Kakarot’s form was practiced and mastered, but the sheer emotions behind the younger one reminded him not to take him lightly. He wiped his face and stepped back, no longer letting his guard be slacked anymore. 

“Stop it, you fucking morons—”

“Let’s take this elsewhere,” his Kakarot proposed and Vegeta felt the blood drain from his face. 

“Very well. The first place seems appropriate.” 

“Fine.” 

“No— stop it—idiots—” He scrambled to close the distance between he and either of them, but his fogged mind could barely register what was taking place. How could the last handful of minutes have actually occurred so quickly and how could it have slipped through his fingers without even an attempt to gather control. He hadn’t even had a chance to try. 

They were gone before he could reach either of them. 

And he stood alone in the middle of a mountain countryside, with nothing but a breeze and silence. And the pure agony of not being able to stop Kakarot from punishing his younger self when he’d done nothing wrong. Vegeta had deserved it. Kakarot hadn’t. 

He tipped his face forward into his hand. “What have I done…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit’s getting real now, y’all. Can’t wait for the next chapters.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hope you like drama.

Time stopped. 

At least that was the illusion. The longer he waited, the more it seemed to stretch, until it wasn’t moving with him anymore. Relativity was concurrent with gravity and he felt outside of it. Far away from everything. They were somewhere he couldn’t reach, where he couldn’t feel the pull of them anymore and the flow of time only moved with them. Even when he tried to catch up with them, they moved their location. That goddamn ability to teleport made him want to scream. He hated it and hated them. He had no choice but to stay where he was and wait. 

He had no choice but have to let his version of time tick away, while they sped off in their stupidity. From the moment the two Kakarots ever met, they would have been willing to cross fists just for the sake of a fight. If they would fight over nothing, then of course they would clash severely if it came to something they had a reason behind. To see them both crackling so viciously left Vegeta unusually wilted. 

Why didn’t he step in and try to stop them? He felt like he did at least try to raise his disapproval, but his inaction stemmed entirely from being too struck with disbelief that their situation had actually come to that. He hadn’t expected Kakarot. He expected his jilted older self to be causing the trauma; and technically, it was still his doing. The older one had said he was going to tell him where they were. 

He just didn’t actually fucking expect him to bring him back with him. 

Leave it to himself to set him up like that. Just when he thought he understood how awful he was, he was proving himself even more awful. It wasn’t even his future self proving it; he was awful enough to walk Kakarot right into a beating. He’d seen what ten years of difference did and being overpowered quickly and then left beaten down would be merciful. Kakarot was the merciful one. 

But god damn it all, why was it taking so long? Why did it feel like they were gone forever? He couldn’t pin them down to any single, static location for long. They kept moving. To keep him away? Or were they just in the heat of their stupidity? Both plausible. He wanted to go back to sleep. He wished he had just gone back to bed after all. It wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, but at least then he could have pretended for a few minutes longer he wasn’t in the middle of the most collossal of his many fuck ups. 

With his head perched in his hands, he sat on a step and waited—counting seconds until he forgot numbers. Forgot what language he was counting numbers in. Forgot what order he was counting them in. It didn’t matter as long as the numbers were counting. He just needed time to move, to acknowledge it was flowing in some direction and not stopped entirely. For a brief moment, he felt more powerless than he ever felt under Frieza and it left him cold. 

The best he could hope for was it wasn’t irreversible. He could fix this somehow. 

At some point, he’d stopped feeling for them. He couldn’t trace them when they were hiding from him and his focus was cracked, tuned to mumbling numbers until even they weren’t helping him keep a coherent sense of time. But the first sound to break through his mumbling finally did make him pause and look up. He wasn’t alone anymore and he could feel the presence of another. 

One of them had come back. The sudden appearance of another body so close, could only mean teleportation. But he only saw one of them in his initial sweep, eyes scanning around before falling over the one that did return. 

He looked rough, powered back down to his baseline form. Blood stained his cheeks and nose and droplets splattered across the fabric of his shirt. The red smears on his knuckles left a very telling impression that his opponent was...in worse shape, probably. What had these idiots done? 

Vegeta didn’t move, struck for a brief moment by the alarming realization that he couldn’t...immediately tell which Kakarot he was looking at. The presence of blood and fresh bruising—battered and battle damaged—made it hard to make that determination on the spot. He remained frozen, unsure of how to respond in light of his stunning fact. The very real possibility suddenly presented itself that...the older Kakarot had lost the fight. 

Because the longer he said nothing, the more he started to become convinced maybe this was the case… 

But then Kakarot smiled at him and sagged his shoulders, wiping his face. Something in his expression didn’t reflect that of a victor. Kakarot didn’t have the stunning winner’s grin he always had. There would be no real winner there. 

Vegeta moved to stand, but he felt paralyzed; looking up at him and seeing his expressions mold and shift as the minutes passed. The fight wasn’t one he wanted to have and that left him despondent, while trying to come down from the natural physical high. 

“It’s over now,” Kakarot finally spoke. 

Vegeta’s whole body shifted in response to his few words and he knew, with a chill in his chest. This wasn’t the right Kakarot. The one who he thought was going to come back, wasn’t the one who did. The one who deserved to lose, did...That only seemed right, but it...left him with a twist in his guts that forced him to look away from him.

“It’s time to go home.” 

“...Where is he?” He couldn’t look him directly in the eyes, but he asked him nonetheless. And he felt the annoyance in his response. 

“Vegeta…Seriously, after all of this, it’s time to go home.” 

“I want to know where he is, Kakarot, and what state you left him in.” 

“It doesn’t matter, he can pick himself up eventually, when he’s done licking his own wounds. We don’t belong here, so we should go. It’s not like you do be this dumb. What the hell? Am I really that bad that you needed to run away to...me? You call me stupid, but even I see how stupid that is. I don’t get it.” 

“You really fuckin’ wouldn’t, Kakarot. Come back in ten years, when you’re less of an annoying, clinging puppy,” Vegeta snarled at him, almost considering the merits of taking a swing at him, himself. 

“If you weren’t running off behind me, sleepin’ with another me, maybe I wouldn’t have to try harder to get your attention.” 

Vegeta’s patience was beginning to run so thin with Kakarot, and all he wanted, was to know where the other one was. Instead he was perfectly willing to start yelling at the one who he’d originally wanted to begin with. He was beginning to lose track of himself and he hated it. “Maybe if you’d noticed from the very beginning, I wouldn’t have gotten caught up with him first to begin with.”

“You didn’t think for just a damn second that if he wanted it, that maybe I did too? You just, went right along with it? Instead of pausin’ and maybe comin’ to me to see if it was similar? That’s so stupid. You’re stupid. I can’t believe I gotta say it, but you’re stupid.” 

Hearing the words out of Kakarot’s mouth infuriated him at some level he didn’t quite understand. Was it because the astonishing truth of it came smashing into him at a velocity he wasn’t expecting? Was it the fact that Kakarot of all people was calling him stupid? Was it that he was still feeling a deep, painful concern for the other Kakarot despite everything else? The factors could have attributed to all of them at once and even ones he hadn’t considered. He was furious, he knew that much. 

“And evidently you became a villain when I turned around, Kakarot. And I don’t think I like the look on you much,” he snarled, fists tightened and shoulders trembling. 

“I’m not a villain because I’m kickin’ you while you’re down. I’m just using tactics you’d use, isn’t that right? That’s what it’s takin’ to get you home, then I’ll do it.” 

He remained silent for another moment, before he repeated. “Where is he?” 

“God damn it, Vegeta—” 

“—If I’m leaving, Kakarot, then I want to see him before I fucking go. Now where the fuck is he?” Vegeta’s voice was just shy of a full growl and he was no longer willing to go back and forth with him anymore. He could sort out the things he’d need to think about later, but he wanted to see what state the other one was in and make sure he was...at least okay. He was part of what got them into this. 

“I left him where you and I fought the first time. That’s where we ended up. You know where that was. He’s still there. Go see him, but...please just come back home.” 

The tension of his voice slipped away and Vegeta almost spared a look back at him. Kakarot was not an angry person, but he was fighting with his limits with this and Vegeta was consistently testing them. To know that Vegeta was expecting the other one to return, must have been salt to one of the many wounds. He was sure it was obvious that he wasn’t expecting him to be the one to return. Logically, he shouldn’t have won and Vegeta didn’t understand. What he did understand, was that he needed to see the other one. 

He flew to him, without making any attempt to be discreet anymore. Nothing mattered more than finding him, and closing the distance took less time than he ever remembered. Time continued to flow out of sync for him with everything else. The gravitational pull toward Kakarot was so strong, that he felt like he was losing minutes for every second he wasn’t there. Neither of them would have killed each other, or left the other dying, but he was losing him in another way. 

The battlefield did not take long to find. The old scars left behind from previous fights, had large new ones carved into the landscape and Vegeta could feel Kakarot in the pit of a steep decline. His ki was flickering lowly, just above was whisper of the loud roar he always perceived it to be. What could have happened for him to lose this severely? Super Saiyan Four was not that weak. Kakarot was not that weak compared to himself. Their scaling was not that badly skewed. There was no way that his own future self had obliterated him, but Kakarot lost. 

Yet, the evidence was before him, laying out on his back—making very little efforts to move outside of opening his eyes to greet him, once he became aware of his approach. 

“...Hey…” 

Vegeta dropped down beside him and looked him over, grimacing at the mess of him. What a sloppy heap he ended up in. “Don’t you ‘Hey’ me...What the hell happened...You’re fucked—if you hadn’t run off and actually listened to me telling you to stop—.” He took a deep breath through his nose to calm himself down. There was no point in admonishing him after the fact. His reason for being there, did not include ending it with anger. His anger was all inward, anyway. 

“I know… I didn’t wanna let go,” he admitted. Vegeta felt it, painfully. Despite their vastly different personalities, this dunce was clearly just as obsessive as Vegeta himself. He always had been, it was just never as obvious because of Kakarot’s much less oppressive demeanor. He was more pleasant to be around. His specific dedications sometimes flew under the radar much more swiftly that way. Vegeta never noticed because of it. 

He never considered the parallel. 

Kakarot was right. He was stupid. And that was more painful than any punch he’d ever taken from him. 

“...I have to go back…” 

His face did not change, but his eyes closed. Silence hung there for a moment. Kakarot already understood this outcome. Even if he’d won, ultimately, they could not keep this going forever. They were from completely different timelines, different worlds. The escape was fleeting, but the fantasy had been...nice...while it lasted. Kakarot recognized that, because he found a small smile to give him and Vegeta leaned over a bit to help him sit up a bit straighter. 

“I’m glad you came to see me, anyway.” he chuckled, bracing an arm over Vegeta’s shoulder to sit forward and stabilize himself better. 

“...I didn’t want to leave without saying anything at all. I needed to know how he left you. Even if we deserved it, I still...thought you’d be the one to come back and I guess that’s the terrible part. But you can’t tell me my paranoia isn’t justified, anymore,” Vegeta let him lean his weight against him, and he found a place to sit and support him better. 

Kakarot shifted around, finding himself recovering enough to roll himself over and wrap his arms around him. He wouldn’t stay that way for long, shifting again quickly, but clearly Kakarot needed the last moments of closeness. Vegeta was not going to stop him. He bent over to meet him halfway, even. Hating every weak second he put into it; kissing him like he was clinging to it. It was disgusting and something he would never do, and yet, there he was. This idiot’s face in his hands; going through this goodbye again. 

“Yeah, guess not…Wish you’d be paranoid about things that don’t get my butt kicked, though,” Kakarot mumbled. The whispers against his lips made Vegeta turn his face to debate biting him. “...Surprised he let you come here…” 

Vegeta openly scoffed at him and the very concept of it. “Watch it, Kakarot. No one actually tells me what the fuck I can and can’t do...I just...know that staying...is something I can’t let myself do...We both knew it from the beginning. We’re just being reminded.” 

“Yeah… I guess...I just didn’t expected to get my reminder like this,” he chuckled sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck in the way Kakarot always did. His quirk that Vegeta knew he did when he had no other means to express himself and felt awkward. He knew his body language that well. “I had the upper hand the whole time. But then he turned it all on me in a shot...I didn’t know you taught him Galick Gun…” 

Confusion struck him and he tilted his head a bit, catching his full gaze again. “I never taught him Galick Gun,” he stated blatantly. Kakarot had never expressed any interest and he’d never offered. The two of them trained together often, but they didn’t exchange techniques in that manner. He’d trained Trunks, but he’d not bothered with that level of mastery with anyone else. Hell, he’d had more technique training with Kakarot’s goddamn youngest son, while sparring with his own brat, than he’d had with Kakarot himself. 

“...That’s not...Are you sure? Because, I took a full blast shot, point blank, that dropped me immediately and it sure felt like a mastered technique. I thought he was going for Kamehameha, but he turned his hand last second and Galick Gun fires quicker…” 

“I never taught him...We never exchange that sort of training…” Brows turned together and he felt like he was missing something critical. It explained how Kakarot had won against the disadvantage he should have been going up against, but how had he done so without Vegeta ever noticing him— 

“....Vegeta.” 

Time switched on him again, and the gears in his head started to turn. Wires connected and information processed enough for him to finally make sense of the information he had been given. His blood nearly stopped flowing when it occurred to him; a startling realization that he hadn’t even fathomed. All of his reasons to believe in his own paranoia only became cemented into reality with Kakarot addressing not him, but someone else when he spoke that name. 

His approach was swift—instant—coming with the aid of the younger Kakarot’s Instant Transmission. Of course. That explained everything. He never taught him Galick Gun. But that did not mean a Vegeta hadn’t taught him. That a Vegeta would not be angry enough to be willing to spend the time for the sake of giving back what he thought they deserved. Kakarot accused him of not fighting his own battle, but Vegeta wasn’t an idiot. 

He would hit someone where it hurts. 

And so would this one, apparently. 

“Now don’t you two just look fucking pitiful,” he spoke, folding his arms and standing over them, looking down from his vantage point. “Did I miss the mushy ‘I love yous’? I fucking hope so, because I might just destroy you both if I have to actually witness it.” 

Vegeta’s eyes flicked between him and his Kakarot, standing behind him. Kakarot was backing him. Nothing suggested that he would stop him if he intended to do anything and that alarmed him. The innate feelings of self preservation were screaming for him to try and smooth this over, but he didn’t know what to do. He’d made the one person with the most self destructive tendencies, the most angry. 

Fuck. 

“What...don’t tell me you thought I was done with you? I haven’t even fucking started.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit gets real. And my favorite chapter is next. There is no shortage of complicated fuckery in this series my friends. We all die together here. Scorned Vegeta is the meanest Vegeta. 
> 
> Hope you’re enjoying the dramatics!!
> 
> ** I will start warning people now that if you’re following this series, there will be one shots that take place after this one concludes and I would heavily recommend following the alerts from the Seven Series page. Or you’ll miss the connecting stuff to the next big multichapter part.**


	6. Chapter 6

Vegeta couldn’t find a single word to give back to the form towering over them—paralyzed from his older counterpart’s incredibly dominant presence. No, Vegeta knew he wasn’t done with them; and he told Kakarot that he didn’t think they were going to get away without another confrontation. But the scale of his appearance was far more calculated than what he could have even dreamed up. If Vegeta was right, then he had every reason to fear for both he and the older Kakarot—who had taken enough of a beating to no longer be able to protect him like before. 

“Kakarot did such good job, didn’t he?” His aged voice spoke from above and he watched his own face, twisting into something like amusement, under his malice. “He was very dedicated to my efforts toward putting you fools in your place. I took him with me into the time chamber for long enough to get him familiar with how to deal with you,” he turned his eyes down to the older Kakarot, tone so condescending that Kakarot winced in response. “I’m not stupid, not like the two of you are.”

He was right. There was nothing stupid about what he’d done. To place them both in the perfect positions to leave them helpless, was tactically flawless and Vegeta could not ignore the colossal defeat. He couldn’t even bring himself to formulate a single word of backtalk in response this time. Being beaten down was bruising to his ego and shut him up enough the first time, but the complete collapse of his safety net held far more impact. Kakarot losing because of his strategical brilliance, hit much harder than any fist.

His father would be so fucking proud to see his son’s strategic prowess; and it made his stomach sour for being on the receiving end of it. 

“You were willing to give him mastery of Galick Gun for that?” Vegeta finally managed to find something to say, not entirely confident if it was the correct thing to ask. 

“For that? You say, as if my reasoning isn’t quite good enough for you,” he responded, words sharp enough to make Vegeta regret his decision to speak at all. They were not the correct words, after all. “Perhaps you misunderstand just how lucky you actually are,” his voice dropped threateningly, but Vegeta didn’t have time to consider the warning. 

The collision of his foot into the side of his head left him missing seconds, lost in a brief blackout while his vision tried to catch up to the trauma he was experiencing suddenly. Kakarot was willing to show mercy on his counterpart, but there would be none of that happening with this one. The older, much meaner, Vegeta had no intention of withholding the intensity of his strike—and he felt it down through his bones, when he forced himself to sit back up. Clearing the stars from his eyes took time and he made his best attempt to put his guard up, but he had no chance. Just like before. 

When he could see without the world appearing like a heavy fog, he jumped to see his own face directly in his line of sight—close enough to feel like he was looking in a cursed mirror. “You aren’t even capable of attempting to block, what a pitiful sight. That’s why I didn’t just beat you to death and leave you for him to find. What good would that have done me, hm? What lesson would that have taught you?” 

“What...The fuck are you talking about,” Vegeta managed to hiss at him, knowing he had no business in testing his luck with this man’s apparently limitless scorn; but he felt compelled. The beating he received before had every bit of a near death experience in his eyes. “You did just that—” 

Everything he said became a mistake, he started to realize quickly. 

Before his body could even try to respond, his older body-double was lifting up from where he had been—jerking him to his feet with such force that his shirt nearly ripped apart at the neck. Instinct had him reaching out to grip his wrist and brace himself at being suddenly on his feet. At contact, he flinched from the pulse of his ki under his fingers. The familiarity was bizarre—weird that it was his own, but the hostility surged with such intensity, that he almost let go. Vegeta recognized his own rage from the outside and if he had not been on the immediate exterior of it, then he would have taken a moment for some serious reflection. 

But self preservation took precedence. If he let go of his wrist, he had a very sincere belief he could be punished severely for stepping away. 

“I didn’t beat you nearly as badly as I had intended to, you stupid bitch,” he snapped in his face, teeth showing in his snarling. “You wouldn’t have learned a damn thing from it. No. Not you nor Kakarot. If you had learned, or been capable, you would have taken my original warning to heart. I expected more out of you, and got significantly less. And Kakarot? Don’t make me fucking laugh. I don’t expect anything out of him anymore.” 

“Then...what is the problem...why are you doing this...if you don’t expect anything, then why are you going out of your way to do this…” He swallowed, feeling more at risk in the hands of his furious future self, for these moments, than he ever felt in the life threatening battles of his past. “If he doesn’t matter to you anymore, then why do you care…”

Silence. 

Horrifying. Dreadful. Silence. 

Several moments collected and Vegeta tried to make sense of the response to his words. The kaleidoscope of shifting expressions and the sudden...flickering of his ki sent alarm bells off in his head and he briefly wondered if he was going to find himself in a coma before long. He expected to be struck, but the attack didn’t come. With how the tension was building, he almost would have preferred it. 

When he finally did speak, his voice was low. Seething. “If he doesn’t matter to me….?” Almost a whisper, but each syllable became steadily heavier, like weighted boots coming down on thin ice. “...Hah. I refuse to believe you can be any incarnation of me and be this fucking...stupid,” he let go of his shirt, fingers just slipping free with brushing motion. He mistook that for dismissal, but that was far from what the action meant.

His counterpart was just giving himself a window to wind back for the sucker punch to his face that sent him flying a distance from the fallen Kakarot. Neither Kakarot could—nor apparently would—intervene. One of them didn’t have the present capacity, and he couldn’t fault his own Kakarot for staying out of it. After all, he’d wronged him most of all. 

Pain trailed up through his temple and he forced himself back up. If he was going to get trounced by himself, then he had a duty to at least do so on his feet for as long as feasibly possible; so he shoved his body back to a standing position and blinked away the blurry world until he could at least see his villain. The distance between them was far shorter than he was hoping to see. Short enough that he lifted his arms to defend, but still found a hand smacking into his face and taking hold—fingers digging into his cheeks and crushing against his jaws. 

“I was over him,” he started, jacking his face up tighter and glaring down at him—unbothered by intimidating his own image. 

Vegeta didn’t understand it. He wasn’t over it, clearly. He cared still. He implied very much so that he cared, but was trying to make the impression that he did not? Vegeta knew he was complicated, but he even he knew a blatant contradiction. And his expression, though pained and tired, must have been very apparent. 

“And then you showed up, and fucking ruined it.” 

The words felt cold, like a splash of ice across his chest that crawled down his body uncomfortably. The desolate acceptance of his declaration came like a fresh blow to the face, where no physical strike had been made. To say the words, meant that he had given up entirely at some point. Proof existed that he could have learned to accept that he would learn to move on, but obviously at a cost—if everything he’d heard from the older Kakarot was true. 

“Spent half of my life trying to put away this bullshit, only to have a younger weak piece of shit, show up for for five minutes and open him up in a way I apparently couldn’t for thirty years. Thirty fucking years, and then you—you take what I wanted from him damn near instantly.” The older Vegeta’s sense of control was quickly beginning to slip away from him as the words started to tumble from his mouth. Once he’d started, he failed to pick a stopping point and his temper flared hotly. “I had come to accept it, I made my peace. I was fucking over it and done with him and then you blew it wide open again. Because, you stupid son of a bitch, I do care. And you fucking ruined my chance of peacefully being done with this bullshit. And you’re going to pay for it—” 

“—V...Vegeta, wait…” Kakarot’s voice cut in, audibly struggling to be heard. The distance created between them made the exchange difficult and his body double’s touchy mood did nothing to help make him more accommodating to stop and listen. If anything, the chance of him snapping back may have increased by the inclusion of Kakarot into their conversation. How dare he speak to him, after everything, after all? 

Fingers nearly bending the bones in his face left him to believe this was the case, anyway. 

“You have more balls in two seconds of uttering those words than you’ve had in the last….oh, how long have you been playing me for a fool? Trying to act like you were making anything work with me, but you were looking at someone else. I had been watching your fucking face looking at him, every time you looked at me. So yes, let’s ask me to wait. As if I haven’t been patient enough with you.” 

Vegeta could not see the older Kakarot, but he could hear the hiss from him—the telltale sign that what was said had struck him harder than he’d expected. No words were being minced for the sake of anyone’s feelings anymore. In fact, quite the opposite. The one they’d assumed felt the least attached to the situation had clearly been the most misread and he’d decided he’d had more than enough. All of the things he’d felt, because of what they did, had finally reached the boiling point. 

“If it’s me that’s messed up, then that’s one thing...But don’t take it out on him, he’s not the one who...started this again,” Kakarot tried to bargain, but his bargaining meant nothing. “I’m the one who came back...I’m the one who went looking…” 

“Yes, I know. I spent a year being a replacement and I am sufficiently incensed, Kakarot,” he nearly had a tilted smirk—like he found something funny about it all, despite his dark eyes just narrowing down at his younger self, casting judgment. The contradiction left a chaos that Vegeta had no words to describe. “And you,” he addressed Vegeta directly, “did the very same to yours. But you have the capacity to feel guilt much more heavily than Kakarot, don’t you? You know just how fucking wrong you are.” 

He did. 

Because of this, he didn’t fight back when he was forcibly lifted off his feet. The hand that was crushing his face was accompanied by the other around the base of his neck and he expected to feel a significant amount of pain by the time he saw the ground again. 

“—Vegeta, stop...Don’t…” Kakarot’s voice was pitching, the sound of it wavering with his movements. Vegeta could hear him starting to shift and pick himself up and try to come closer. He was going to fight himself back on his feet to try and stop the older one from going off the deep end, but it was starting to seem like that had already long since happened. 

“Come a step closer, Kakarot, and I will twist his head off.” The shuffling stopped suddenly. “Now sit the fuck back down. I am not finished. I wouldn’t have to be here, if you hadn’t dragged this back out. If you had practiced discretion in the first place, this Kakarot might have been able remain blissfully unaware. I would have been unaware. We could have ended this and no one would be threatening anyone right now. Instead, here we are. He’s upset, I’m exceptionally angry, and both of you are potentially murder victims if you even breathe at me in the wrong way, today.” 

“...This wasn’t how this was supposed to turn out…At all, okay...This wasn’t the intention, Vegeta...We weren’t out to hurt you—” the injured man’s explanation was earnest, but it wasn’t enough. 

And surprisingly, the older Vegeta was not the one to answer him. It was Kakarot’s own younger physical copy who finally spoke among the four of them, previous content to listen. “But you did. The first time, whatever. Okay. We kinda got that. None of us knew or nothin’. ‘Geta got mad and jumped to throw fists, but he literally does that at everything and we all know that. But then...Y’all did this. And, honestly, even I’m mad. I’m pissed. Right now, I kinda hate you both. However it was supposed ta’ turn out, didn’t happen because you didn’t want it to happen that way, right? You chose to undo it after everything. I’ve been fightin’ to outdo you and losing the whole time. Felt pretty good to drop you like a dead weight, if you wanna know. Because he was sure I was going to lose to you.” 

Vegeta’s stomach twisted, because he wasn’t wrong. Kakarot had interpreted that correctly and he hated every second of his transparency. 

“I deserved to lose that fight...I know...Meeting him again was my mistake. I knew what I was doing...I just...Missed what it used to be like.. Vegeta gave up and I feel that. I maybe I still felt that when I tried to go back. The distance never closed, even when we came back and were in the same bed.”

“Vegeta isn’t going to let you read him without learning his language first.” 

“Yeah, except he’s never tried to help me learn it.” 

“I just spent six months in solitude with him, and I think I understand plenty. You’re just hung up on mine. And thanks to that, he won’t look at me anymore, so thanks a bunch,” the younger Kakarot’s tone held an unusual mixture of displeased and annoyance. “But I won. I’m taking him home.” 

Neither of them wanted to hear the words, but they were coming. They knew they were going to be handed that sentence and the division was inevitable anyway. Even in the face of their confrontation, pain still came associated with having to be separated. Guilt didn’t really help staunch the feelings anymore. Those would have to die with time, if they managed to ever make them fade enough. 

“What will change from here…? Did any of this make it better?” Kakarot asked, and Vegeta struggled to find his reason for that question. He was testing his fate with how angry his own Vegeta was and he wanted to just tell him to stop, but from what he could finally see of him, Kakarot didn’t appear to care if his words had any last effect. Kakarot had a tendency to run his mouth and pick up the aftermath once he’d done the damage. 

Vegeta silently begged him to stop. 

“Did it make it better, Kakarot?” The dangerous tone return, so swiftly that Vegeta knew he was in immediate danger. His chance to get out of the way never presented itself, however, because he was very quickly taken by the neck and removed from the equation by a violent outburst.

The strength of the punishing slam of his body into the earth, left Vegeta teetering somewhere between planes and he did not immediately understand the sensations and random misfirings in his brain. Pain didn’t register for a long time, to make him aware that he’d been viciously beaten back into the ground and left to come back into consciousness in the brisk moment following the flash of outburst. The whole event took place in an instant and his memory could not find a way to fill the gap where the moment just before the impact occurred, but he knew he had to pull himself back into his head quickly. 

Absent moments in his memory from being briefly blacked out, had him struggling to come back to loud screaming. The ramp up time had already long since been done and the new target of his assault was Kakarot—no longer him. 

Sitting up left the world spinning, but he felt an instinctive need to move toward the conflict. For the sake of the desperation in the voice that was his. He felt compelled to stop him, to stop himself from what he’d turned toward, even if he didn’t have the clarity to see without his vision blurring. 

“Nothing makes it better, Kakarot—I’m still dealing with a reemergence of feelings I finally got rid of and I get nothing for them—I spent seven years contending with depression because of you. Had to learn what depression even was. Had a crisis because then you came back after I thought I was over that. Lost all my fucking sense of self, only to realize I never knew what my sense of self ever was. All of it directly your fault. I get over a different aspect of you and you pull this again—then again—Again. And again—. I wish you people left me dead, because all I get from you is reasons to get colder—” He was screaming and Vegeta felt every word pass through him. Too personally. To familiar. 

This was a ten year preview of what he could be. 

He did not want to be like that. 

“I hate you—I hate you and if you ever fucking speak to me again, I will just wipe you and everything you love off this fucking planet, and I hope you feel my scorn for the rest of your life—” He continued to hiss, words coming through in uneven syllables. His anger was speaking over his words, and what he was saying didn’t have any truth to it. The older Vegeta’s hands were forced down around Kakarot’s neck, disabling his ability to speak at all. His threat was minimized toward anyone else, but Kakarot was in significant danger. 

Suddenly Super Saiyan Four, Vegeta was no longer playing. 

He was breaking Kakarot into the ground beneath them and his ki was spiking like knives in every direction. The possibility of him accidentally killing Kakarot was actually very low. It was the probability of it being intentional that was considerably high, at that moment. 

“I was fucking obsessed with you and I couldn’t have been more fucking obvious about it than if I hung a sign—and what a blunder that was—What a fucking mistake—” His words were short of being shrill in their own way. He couldn’t express himself in words how he felt and he just screamed at him, raising a fist to punch directly down into Kakarot’s face, before going right back to strangling him. 

Vegeta tried to get to him, but he did not have the capacity to overcome the intense form or the coordination following his brain scrambling. Stopping him was a priority before he regretted his actions, but Vegeta had no idea how to accomplish that without becoming a casualty. Kakarot’s sheer shock at being so overpowered left him at his mercy. 

This was far from how Vegeta ever wanted to win a fight against Kakarot. He knew that even from where he was, as the loser on the wrong end. 

He opened his mouth to try and say something, anything, but he had no need. 

A pair of arms came around the older Vegeta and it made him pause in his assault. From the position held—straddling over Kakarot and bearing down on him with all his force to break him down—the older Vegeta couldn’t see the one behind him. He knew who it was, clearly, because he lost tension in his arms and after a moment, his shoulders dipped and sagged. Sense clicked back in as quickly as he’d connected the dots of who was touching him.

“You don’t wanna do this… Okay?” The younger Kakarot spoke, just barely loud enough for Vegeta to hear from his position. The gentle coaxing brought the Super Saiyan Four back to base form and he was able to pull him away from the older Kakarot entirely—who had nearly lost his fight in trying to stay conscious. “You’ve done enough,” his embrace remained and Vegeta took note of a startling detail...yet, somehow unsurprising, given what he knew of himself. 

The older, angry, spiteful image of himself looked exhausted, wiping the tears from his face with the back of his hand. 

We wronged them. 

He met eyes with his Kakarot, seeing the same depth of tired in his eyes, as well. They’d put time and effort into making them feel as badly as they’d felt all along. The trap they sprung and the loss the two of them experienced, was just a taste of what they’d earned. None of it made it better, he was right.

“We’re...gonna go. I’m gonna take him back for a while,” his Kakarot finally spoke, glancing off at the recovering form of his older self. “I’m sorry. Didn’t really wanna hurt anyone, well...actually, maybe I kinda did. But...it still stands...It’s gotta stop. Can’t stay like this. We’ll talk about this after coolin’ down.” 

Vegeta nodded, silently. He didn’t feel he deserved words and Kakarot didn’t press him for them, content to focus his efforts on the Vegeta that needed his attention more immediately. He watched Kakarot take away the biggest threat of his future; not physically, but emotionally. No matter what form it came in, Vegeta stood to be his own undoing and he did not want to see the end result of that. 

He knew then that they had to fix it before the damage was irreparable. Until then, he stumbled back over to the older Kakarot, to make sure he was still alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No one can say that Vegeta doesn’t make his explosions a spectacle. Was that the drama you waited for? Can you believe this adventure still has 4 one shots and another long fic left? Yeah. If you wanna keep up with it i will again recommend subscribing at the collection page from here.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Lemme know how you felt!


	7. Chapter 7

Vegeta would have been lying if he said that he wasn’t surprised when they’d left them there, after beating them both down so remorselessly. They’d deserved every bit of the brutal outburst, but the real shocking part came—to him—mostly, in the aftermath. Days following, the two had still not reappeared; and Vegeta had started to become paranoid again by default. What reason could they have possibly had to leave them alone for that many days? He agonized over it, naturally, while he made his efforts to take care of the Kakarot he was left with. 

His beating had been delivered to him by a two part system of justice that was both deserved and devastating. Vegeta’s jilted counterpart didn’t play around one little bit and that tilt of personality was staggeringly effective in its delivery. He’d always flexed his advantage...even if unintentionally, a little bit. But there was no flaunting with the more experienced one. He’d cultivated the anger in his Kakarot and utilized it to an incredible advantage—following it up with his own vengeance seeking with his own hands.

Neither of them really stood a chance, when he sat down and thought about it—and he had plenty of time to think about it. They’d earned every bit of what they’d received, and he didn’t even attempt to argue this time. If it had been him in that position, he would have been just as furious. He just lacked the depth and creativity at his present age to match his older counterpart’s sheer talent for revenge. And honestly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to ever reach that level of cunning. Clearly, it did nothing positive for him. 

The satisfaction of punishing them, didn’t outweigh the pain that the older version of him was experiencing. Anyone with two working eyes could see that. Anyone could feel that if they were in the direct vicinity. And even though it was another form of himself, the differences between them suddenly seemed so gigantic, that it was hard to even recognize himself there in that moment. The person threatening Kakarot’s life—and then stopped by the other one—appeared like a foreign entity that he couldn’t even remotely identify fragments of himself in. They pushed so far, that they shoved him right off a deep end. 

Maybe that had something to do with his nervousness, again, in their absence. For days after they were left in their own mess, they had nothing but silence stretching out. The younger Kakarot had said they would talk, after getting collected...but had it really taken that many days? Or were they just winding back up for the next round? Once the older Kakarot had recovered himself, he knew that a second fight would not be as much of a one sided fiasco...if Kakarot was even willing to fight back. More likely, he would let himself be beaten down again if the other Vegeta came back after him. 

That was the problem in all of it. Did he believe that the other one had the anger left in him to still want to hurt them? Yes. Did he believe he was tired and wanted to get rid of the pain and be done with them? Also yes. But where did that leave him in action? That was what set them so vastly apart. 

What would I do? It doesn’t matter what I would do, because he’s on an entirely different level from me. 

Were it him, he might have continued on his war path until the two of them were broken at his feet and begging for death. Or he might have just never come back, committed to erasing the betrayal forever. But there was a promise of a return, with no implied intention of violence—at least by Kakarot’s way of putting it. From there, at that point, they would have to fix their mistakes. He and the older Kakarot knew it. 

For the several days, silence hung between them. Hardly any words really went spoken and that was probably for the better. Nothing that could be said would fix it. The longer they remained together, communicating like normal, the harder it would make the inevitable separation, anyway. Silence only lessened it marginally, but it offered an option of denial. Neither had to discuss it and acknowledge the feelings associated with what was going to come at them eventually. 

Vegeta didn’t have to admit openly to feeling guilt, remorse, and a sense of dread. Though he felt them all so intensely, that relief almost came with seeing them finally return, on that fourth day. No matter what the mood they brought, anything was preferably to drowning in the anxious wait. The older Kakarot next to him—for once—appeared to have the same discomforts as he, for waiting for so long. He would be beyond saving if he didn’t have the cognizance to understand the gravity of their choices after all of that. It just took losing a fight for it to sink in, it seemed. 

That just made Vegeta’s acute awareness all that much worse. He knew how wrong he was all along; but throwing himself into fire was apparently how he got his kicks. 

“Hope y’all got ya whatevers done,” his Kakarot spoke upon their arrival, standing across from them at the base of the small set of steps, and he was taken back. His tone was there, but the shape of his words weren’t rounded and bubbly in the way he’d come to expect. The words mimicked the way he usually sounded, but they lacked the honesty of his natural cheeriness. His aim was to leave no room to question what was coming next; even if they all knew it quite clearly. 

Vegeta’s surprise just came from hearing Kakarot speak first, when he was absolutely positive his own aged voice was going to be the one snarling at them upon their return. Instead, that one was quiet. That one was standing a few steps behind Kakarot—arms crossed over his chest—silent. Passive. His eyes kept to Kakarot, content to watch him take the lead. For a brief moment, Vegeta considered that maybe Kakarot was being coached, but it occurred to him in the moments following, that he would rather that have been the case, as opposed to what it actually was. 

He wasn’t being coached. He was being given the floor to speak. And something in him had reason to believe he would regret it, if he interrupted him for any reason. 

Kakarot glanced back at the older one he came back with, and then looked at them. The accusation Vegeta felt in that brief wash over, was unlike anything he’d ever experienced from this man before. Kakarot didn’t do that. He mistakenly assumed Kakarot wasn’t invested, or capable of that retaliation. Which was horrendously wrong on his part. Kakarot was a saiyan, after all. Instincts alone would make him territorial after some point. 

“Sorry it took us a minute ta get back. But it shoulda been enough ta close up your ends, yeah? ‘Cause we’re goin’ back now. We been here too long already, an’ maybe if ya kiss his ass a whole lot, big me, he might try an’ forgive ya.” Despite his words, they all knew how unlikely it would be that he would really forgive him for his actions. Accept them, maybe. But forgiveness implied that any form of him—any Vegeta could handle being placed second with any grace. 

Vegeta watched to see how his body double might react, but he was met with nothing. No response at all. Somehow, he hadn’t anticipated it. He expected some kind of sneer or some visual retort to Kakarot’s words to imply the unlikeliness that he would accept the older fool back. But the passive expression remained and he left no indication that he intended to argue against what was being said. Clearly, the two of them had done their share of speaking in the days they had been away. More than what he and the older Kakarot had done. Perhaps they should have, but what was left to be said? 

Every time they spoke, they dug themselves deeper graves. If they’d never spoken in the first place, they’d have avoided every poor decision; as if poor decisions just couldn’t be avoided. Vegeta knew that was a choice and he meant to be smarter, but he lost all sense of reason when it came to Kakarot. Had he sat down and thought about it, alone in a void, he probably would have considered the whole idea a remarkable abortion of intelligence. However, with him standing in front of him, the fog of impulse just choked the sense out of him. 

He wasn’t ignorant to what that implied. He just didn’t like to consider the depth of it. To admit to feeling that level of attachment was essentially looping his own noose. His Kakarot couldn’t replace the feeling he had for the one he ran off with, but he had to accept the severance and return to what he did have. 

Because it wasn’t like he cared nothing for his Kakarot. That’s what made the whole situation so ugly. 

“Y’know, we’re cool, big me,” Kakarot said, filling the moment of silence, after Vegeta finally broke his gaze from them. Staring down at the floor, and not his face as he spoke, made it easier to hear just how oddly his words were shaped after all the events were swept away. Kakarot forgave everyone, but something in the tone of his voice came off undeniably unlike himself and Vegeta could not identify it. “Think ya pulled an awful fast one on me, but guess if I didn’t say anythin’, I can’t be mad atcha about the beginning.” 

The beginning was not the problem, and the silence that followed made it abundantly clear that no one was ignorant of that fact. Perhaps all of them took a share of the blame for being so stupidly unaware of their own feelings. None of them handled anything in an appropriate matter, but the continuous poor decision making really sent them into their downward spiral. Consciously poor decisions. 

Even after knowing that they finally had what they wanted in the first damn place. 

“Gotta say though, I think it’s kinda fucked up y’all did this.” Like a sour note, the turn of his tone forced Vegeta to look right back up at him. “Sorry, I been around him a lot. And he had a lotta stuff to say about you two. Y’know how he can talk. Kinda got used to it. But he had a pretty good point, honestly. Did we not try or what? I mean, I thought I was...giving ya whatcha wanted, but ya never really made it clear what ya wanted from me. The hell made him different from me, ‘Geta?” 

“...It sounds wrong to hear you like that,” Vegeta found himself, stunned from answering by the unusual forwardness. Kakarot didn’t speak that way.

“An it sounded wrong when he showed up an’ told me y’all ran off. I guess I didn’t think you were that stupid, but ya kinda proved ya were. S’why I didn’t stop ‘im til I did. An only then, I did that so he didn’t do something he’d wish he hadn’t. ‘Cause he still cares a lot about ya, big me,” eyes shifted over Vegeta’s shoulder and the two Kakarots exchanged a drawn moment, before he continued. “I got mine from now on, an’ you gotta fix your mess up with yours. It ain’t that hard.” 

“Not that hard…” 

“It’s not,” he barked, earning a jump from the older Kakarot. “Didn’t take me long at all ta understand ‘im. He’s way more patient than my ‘Geta. But he ain’t gonna make it easy when he knows yer looking at him and seeing mine. I know how that feels, don’t I, Vegeta?” 

Eyes came right back to him, and with them came the swell of guilt like a hammer. Yes, Kakarot knew what that would feel like...He had noticed Vegeta not seeing him at all. The disappointment he had in himself for this behavior was overwhelming. How was he supposed to help what he felt? He had a lot of thinking to do, about what he really felt and what it meant in the future—where the events they’d been through were always going to be there in the back of their minds. 

Then he had to wonder, where he stood with his own Kakarot… 

“I wanna go home now. We’re not losin’ anything, we’re just goin’ back to what we had before an’ that’s how it’s supposed ta be right?” 

“Yes,” he finally spoke, unwilling to say anything else. He had to acknowledge that Kakarot was correct. To act like it was a loss was...ridiculous, but it still had the sting of a loss. Not just from seeing the last of the Kakarot he learned to care for, but also, evidently seeing some of the ugliness of his older counterpart bleed into the Kakarot he pined for to begin with. The subtle sharpness of his words...they came from him. They came from Vegeta. Once, he’d have been delighted to think he’d had that influence on Kakarot. But suddenly, he was not so sure. Not in such a way. Those words sounded wrong from his mouth. That anger sounded foreign. 

We did that. 

“Kakarot,” Vegeta’s older counterpart spoke, quietly—to get his attention briefly. He had finally decided he was done being silent, but he had no intensity in him. He just needed that Kakarot to stand aside so he could step forward and put his hand out—palm up, expectantly. He had doubled his meaning, in speaking the name, because he turned his eyes right past Vegeta to the older Kakarot behind him. “Give me the item you’ve used to go back and forth with. I want to see you take it off and place it in my hand. I’m not stupid. I had to come, in person, to obtain a connection to his world in order to go through and seek him out. I beat it out of him and jumped through before it washed off. I have nothing to return, you do.” 

Vegeta moved out of the way to allow Kakarot to step from behind him and come down to be within the other Vegeta’s reach. The older Kakarot released the clasp of the necklace he took and drew it off his neck—letting the chain pool in his hand. The hesitation was barely a second in passing, but hardly missed by anyone present. No one could expect it to be easy, but that Vegeta didn’t back down with his demand, even in the slightest. 

He waited with his hand out until Kakarot let the chain fall into his hand. When he had the item, he stepped back, away from the both of them. He took it back to put it directly in the hand of the only person in his sight that he trusted at the moment. The Kakarot that hadn’t given him a reason to feel scorned. If he had it, then neither of them could exchange it again. 

“Is everything you’re wearing, your own?” His older, jaded voice, directed the question to him. The question was a reasonable one, because if he took anything with him, then they would have this problem again. This time, they wanted to close it completely. 

It was wrong, but the pressure in his chest couldn’t be helped. 

“Yes.” 

“If you’re lying to me, I won’t hesitate to beat the shit out of you.The only reason I haven’t unscrewed your head, is because your Kakarot isn’t a terrible shithead, and he still finds you valuable. Take the only advice I will grant you and don’t fuck up again.” 

His eyes were tired, but intense in a way that left Vegeta no room to argue. Not that he had the intention to argue, he’d done enough already and he was prepared to face the end result of his bad decisions. The uphill battle he had ahead of him was certainly his own doing and he stepped forward to accept it, standing face to face with himself—though still a bit strange, looking at his own image. 

“...Give him a chance to fix it. He will,” he mumbled, knowing both Kakarots could hear him. Having an audience to his words made him uncomfortable, but he needed to say these words before they left; for what little his words might mean to him. Perhaps he was decidedly done with Kakarot, perhaps not. He wouldn’t be around to see the end result. But responsibility sat with him for everything that took place. 

“He has no choice. I’ve put effort into making him feel my wrath, and I will not have it wasted,” he folded his arms in front of him; asserting the domineering presence that Vegeta knew he had, but didn’t see at that magnitude just yet. “Go home. Now. Kakarot,” he tilted his head to the younger of the two, “take the both of you, and go.” 

“Gotcha,” Kakarot held out his hand to him and he hesitated in the same way the older Kakarot hesitated. Taking that hand was removing himself from that man’s presence forever. Necessary, but difficult. They’d complicated everything far too much to make it easy. But he felt a hand on his back, pushing him, and he didn’t have to look back to see who it was sending him off in the right direction. Somehow, that made it easier. 

That Kakarot made one right decision out of all the stupid ones they did make, to let him go easily. Vegeta didn’t even spare a glance at him and chose to step forward to take his Kakarot’s hand. To place his hand in his was to restart everything again. He would have to contend with the change in Kakarot, caused by this; and he would have to deal with his own feelings of loss in regards to what he never should have had in the first place. 

But he took his hand and closed his eyes to vanish from them forever, teleporting away, with Kakarot keeping him close to take them through the portal for the last time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue left and then I begin the three one shots that lead into the last sequel! As I said a few times, if you wanna keep up with this one, I might recommend alerting from the collection. The One Shots cover a few other Points of View. The last long fic will not be as lengthy as this one, but it closes up one more plot thread I have. 
> 
> So wait for the epilogue and the one shots! Hope you enjoy!


End file.
